Glossary

A type of illusionistic decoration in which architectural elements are painted on walls and/or ceilings in such a way that they appear to be an extension of the real architecture of a room into an imaginary space. It was common in Roman art, was revived by Mantegna in the 15th century, and reached its peaks of elaboration in Baroque Italy. The greatest of all exponents of quadratura was probably Pozzo, in whose celebrated ceiling in S. Ignazio, Rome, architecture and figures surge towards the heavens with breathtaking bravura. Unlike Pozzo, many artists relied on specialists called quadraturisti to paint the architectural settings for their figures (see Guercino and Tiepolo, for example).

quadro riportato

The simulation of a wall painting for a ceiling design in which a painted scene is produced in a panel resembling a composition on the surface of a shallow, curved vault. The plural form is quadri riportati.

quatrefoil

decorative motif in Gothic art consisting of four lobes or sections of circles of the same size.

Quattrocento (It. "four hundred")

The 15th century in Italian art. The term is often used of the new style of art that was characteristic of the Early Renaissance, in particular works by Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico and others. It was preceded by the Trecento and followed by the Cinquecento.

Realism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting.

refectory (Med. Lat. refectorium)

Monastic dining hall.

Reformed churches

Churches that rejected the authority of the Pope from the 16th century. In 16th century Europe, the two main denominations were the Lutherans and the Calvinists, with the Anglican Church developing in England.

A French label given to an Italian cultural movement and to its repercussions elsewhere; also, on the assumption that chronological slices of human mass experience can usefully be described in terms of a dominant intellectual and creative manner, a historical period. For Italy the period is popularly accepted as running from the second generation of the 14th century to the second or third generation of the 16th century. Though there is something inherently ridiculous about describing a period of 250 years as one of rebirth, there is some justification for seeing a unity within it, if only in terms of the chronological self-awareness of contemporaries.

For Petrarch the challenge to understand and celebrate the achievements of ancient Rome led him to scorn the intervening centuries which had neglected them; he saw them as an age of intellectual sleep, of 'darkness', and his own as potentially one of light, of an energetic revival of interest in, and competition with, too long forgotten glories. Thanks to his fame not only as a scholar but also as a poet and a voluminous correspondent, this sense of living in an age of new possibilities was rapidly shared by others who worked within the intellectual framework which came to be known as Humanism. Perhaps the sense of living in a new mental atmosphere can be compared to the exhilaration that followed the realization that Marxist analysis could be used to look afresh at the significance of intellectual and creative, as well as political, life. The humanistic enthusiasm lasted so long, however, because its core of energy, the historical reality of antiquity, was so vast and potent, because it was uncontroversial (save when an assassin borrowed the aura of Brutus, or a paganizing faddist mocked Christianity), and because the scholarly excitement about the need to imitate the achievements of the Roman (and, increasingly, Greek) past was sustained by evidence from contemporary art and literature that it could be done. Even when the Wars of Italy had inflicted grievous humiliations on Italian pride, Vasari could still see a process of restored vigour in the arts, which had begun early in the 14th century, as only coming near its close with the death of Michelangelo in 1564.

Vasari's Lives became a textbook of European repute. It was his contention that he was describing what followed from the rinascita or rebirth of the arts that launched the word on its increasingly inclusive career. For long, however, it was a 'renaissance' of this or that, of arts, of scholarship, of letters. Not until the publication in 1855 of the volume in Jules Michelet's Histoire de France entitled 'La Renaissance' was the label attached to a period and all that happened in it; not until the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's still seminal Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860 was it ineluctably identified in particular with Italy and more generally with a phase of human development thought to be markedly different in kind from what went before and what came after.

Thereafter, 'Renaissance' became a mercurial term: not just a label for a period or a movement but a concept, a concept redolent (in spite of Burckhardt's precautions) of Individualism, All-Roundness, even Amoralism; man had escaped from the medieval thought-dungeon, and the world (and its expanding physical and mental horizons) was his oyster; culture was linked to personality and behaviour; the Renaissance became both the scene and the work of Renaissance Man. To a northern European world (whence the alertest scholars and popularizers came), morally confined by Protestantism and social decorum, 'Renaissance' became a symbol of ways of conduct and thought that were either to be castigated (John Ruskin, whose The stones of Venice of 1851-53 had anticipated the art-morality connection) or envied (John Addington Symonds's avidly nostalgic Renaissance in Italy, 1875-86).

A term that had become so liable to subjective interpretation was bound to attract criticism. During this century it has been challenged chiefly on the following points. (1) There is no such thing as a self-sufficient historical period. Much that was characteristic of the Middle Ages flowed into and through the Renaissance. Much that was characteristic of the Renaissance flowed on until the age of experimental science, of industrialization, mobilized nationalism, and mass media. (2) Renaissance art and literature did not develop so consistently that they can be seen in one broad Vasarian sweep. There was an early, a 'high' and a late stage (all variously dated) in terms of artistic and literary aims and style. (3) There is not a true, let alone a uniform, congruence between, 'culture' and 'history' during the period; 'Renaissance' culture came late to Venice, later still to Genoa, both thriving centres of political and commercial activity. (4) To define a period in terms of a cultural élite is to divert attention unacceptably from the fortunes of the population as a whole.

Though thus challenged, mocked (the 'so-called Renaissance'), aped (the 'Carolingian' or 'Ottonian' renaissance, etc.) and genially debased ('the renaissance of the mini-skirt'), the term retains most of its glamour and much of its usefulness. It is surely not by chance that 'rebirth' rather than the 18th century and early 19th century 'revival' (of arts, letters, etc.) was the term chosen, because it applies to a society the resonance of a personal, spiritual and perhaps psychological aspiration: the new start, the previous record - with all its shabbiness - erased. It is for this additional, subjective reason a term to be used with caution. The challenges are to be accepted, however, gratefully, as having led to an enormous extension of knowledge and sensitivity.

repoussoir (French: "to push back")

Repoussoir is means of achieving perspective or spatial contrasts by the use of illusionistic devices such as the placement of a large figure or object in the immediate foreground of a painting to increase the illusion of depth in the rest of the picture. Caravaggio had become famous for his paintings of ordinary people or even religious subjects in repoussoir compositions. Repoussoir figures appear frequently in Dutch figure painting where they function as a major force in establishing the spatial depth that is characteristic of painting of the seventeenth-century. Landscapists too learned to exploit the dramatic effect of repoussoir to enliven their renderings of the flat uneventful Dutch countryside.

retable

Ornamental panel behind an altar and, in the more limited sense, the shelf behind an altar on which are placed the crucifix, candlesticks, and other liturgical objects. The panel is usually made of wood or stone, though sometimes of metal, and is decorated with paintings, statues, or mosaics depicting the Crucifixion or a similar subject. Although frequently forming part of the architectural structure of the church, especially in the High Gothic period, retables can be detached and, sometimes, as in the case of the famous retable by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, "The Adoration of the Lamb" (1432, Cathedral of Saint-Bavon, Ghent), consist merely of a painting. Probably the most well-known retable is that in the Basilica of St Mark in Venice, which is one of the most remarkable examples in existence of the craft of the jeweler and goldsmith. Originally commissioned in 976, the St. Mark's retable was enlarged and enriched in the 13th century. With the development of freestanding altars, retables have become extinct.

rilievo (It. "relief")

In painting, the impression that an object is three-dimensional, that it stands out from its background fully rounded.

In the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français.

Salt War, the

Exasperated by the overriding of their privileges by papal governors, and hit by the rise in price of provisions after two disastrous harvests, the Perugians seized on Pope Paul III's order of 1540, that the price of salt should be increased, as an excuse to revolt. They were still seeking aid, notably from Florence and in Germany, when a papal army forced the city to surrender and swear allegiance to the legate sent to govern it. The chief focus of discontent, the area containing the houses of the old ruling family, the Bentivoglio, was buried under a new fortress, the Rocca Paolina, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.

sanguine

Red chalk with a rownish tinge, used for drawing.

Saracens

During the Middle Ages, the Arabs or Muslims, particularly those who fought against the Christian Crusades.

sarcophagus, pl. sarcophagi (Gk. "flesh eating")

A coffin or tomb, made of stone, wood or terracotta, and sometimes (especially among the Greeks and Romans) carved with inscriptions and reliefs.

satyr

In Greek mythology, human-like woodland deities with the ears, legs and horns of a goat. Often depicted as the attendant of the Bacchus, the god of wine.

scalloped niche

A real or painted niche which has a semi-circular conch in the form of a shell.

Scepticism

This generic term covers several different anti-dogmatic tendencies in ancient and modern philosophy. The founder of the school is traditionally considered to be Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 - c. 270 BC), whose writings, along with all the other original works of the formulators of the tradition, are lost. Information about the movement is contained in later writings such as Cicero's Academica (c. 45 BC), Diogenes Laertius' Life of Pyrrho (3rd century AD), and especially the works of Sextus Empiricus (c. 160 - c. 210 AD). The central thesis of the Sceptics is that certitude is impossible, owing to the many obstacles preventing valid empirical knowledge, in particular the absence of a criterion by which to distinguish truth from falsity. Rather than establishing a system of positive philosophy, the Sceptics emphasized the critical and negative nature of philosophy in questioning what was taken as legitimate knowledge by dogmatic schools such as Platonism and Stoicism.

Little known in the Middle Ages, the Sceptical position was revived in the Renaissance when the writings of Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus once again became available. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was the first Renaissance writer to utilize Sceptical arguments in a systematic way: his lead was followed by Francisco Sanches (1552-1623 ), Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), and many others. The publication of Latin (1562, 1569) and Greek (162I) editions of Sextus Empiricus was important for later diffusion.

Schildersbent (Dutch: 'band of painters')

A fraternal organization founded in 1623 by a group of Netherlandish artists living in Rome for social intercourse and mutual assistance. Its members called themselves Bentvueghels or 'birds of a flock' and they had individual Bentnames - for example Pieter van Laer, one of the early leaders, was called Bamboccio. In 1720 the Schildersbent was dissolved and prohibited by papal decree because of its rowdiness and drunkenness.

Schism, the Great

It began 20 September 1378 when a majority of the cardinals, having declared their election of the Neapolitan Bartolomeo Prignano (Urban VI) 5 months previously to be invalid because of the undue pressure exerted by the Roman mob, elected the Frenchman Robert of Geneva (Clement VII). Although the schism was caused by acute personal differences between Urban and the cardinals, most of whom, being Frenchmen, were deeply unhappy over the return of the Papacy from Avignon to Rome, Christendom divided along political lines once the double election had taken place, with France and her allies Aragon, Castile and Scotland supporting Clement, while England, the Emperor and most other princes remained loyal to Urban.

Most of the Italian states stood behind Urban but in Naples Queen Giovanna I of Anjou provoked a popular and baronial revolt by sheltering Clement, and for the next 20 years the kingdom was contested between, on one side, Charles III of Durazzo (d. 1386) and his son Ladislas, who recognized the Roman pope, and, on the other, Louis I (d. 1384) and Louis II of Anjou, who had the support of the Avignon pope. In northern Italy, the scene was dominated by the expansionist policies of Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan until his death in 1402; from time to time both he and his opponents, the Florentines, flirted with the Avignon popes in the hope of obtaining French support, but with little effect.

Meanwhile the temporal power of the Roman popes survived despite Urban's gift for quarrelling with all his allies, and was considerably built up by his able successor Boniface IX (1389-1404). However, on his death the Roman papacy fell under the domination of King Ladislas of Naples, who drove north through Rome to threaten central Italy, causing the Florentines and most of the other Italian states to throw their weight behind a group of cardinals from both camps who met at Pisa and elected a third pope, Alexander V, in June 1409. It was the continued pressure of Ladislas that finally compelled Alexander's successor Baldassare Cossa (John XXIII) to summon the Council of Constance (1414-18}. This Council healed the Schism by deposing both John and the Avignon pope Benedict XIII and accepting the resignation of the Roman pope, thus leaving the way open for the election in 1417 of Martin V (1417-31), who set about the task of restoring the shattered power and prestige of the Holy See. The 39-year schism killed the supranational papacy of the Middle Ages, for; while devout Christians agonized, practical politicians (often the same people) seized the chance to extend their jurisdiction at the Church's expense. As a result, the Renaissance popes were much more dependent on their Italian resources, and therefore far more purely Italian princes, than their medieval predecessors.

(1) The triangular space between two arches in an arcade. (2) The curved surface between two ribs meeting at an angle in a vault.

staffage

This word, pronounced as French, is used in both English and German to describe the figures and animals which animate a picture intended essentially as a landscape or veduta; in other words, figures which are not really essential and could be added by another painter. In the highly specialized world of the Dutch painters of the 17th century this was very often the case, so that a landscape painter like Wynants rarely did his own staffage; whereas Canaletto or Guardi always did.

Stanze (Ital. rooms)

The suite of rooms in the Vatican decorated by Raphael.

stigmata, sing. stigma (Gk. "mark, brand, tattoo")

The five Crucifixion wounds of Christ (pierced feet, hands and side) which appear miraculously on the body of a saint. One of the most familiar examples in Renaissance art is the stigmatization of St. Francis of Assisi.

stipple engraving

Printmaking process that achieves tonal areas by directly engraving short flicks or dots, usually in conjunction with engraved or etched lines.

stucco

A type of light, malleable plaster made from dehydrated lime (calcium carbonate) mixed with powdered marble and glue and sometimes reinforced with hair. It is used for sculpture and architectural decoration, both external and internal. In a looser sense, the term is applied to a plaster coating applied to the exterior of buildings, but stucco is a different substance from plaster (which is calcium sulphate). Stucco in the more restricted sense has been known to virtually every civilization. In Europe it was exploited most fully from the 16th century to the 18th century, notable exponents being the artists of the School of Fontainebleau and Giacomo Serpotta. By adding large quantities of glue and colour to the stucco mixture stuccatori were able to produce a material that could take a high polish and assume the appearance of marble. Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to distinguish from real marble without touching it (stucco feels warmer).

studiolo, pl. studioli (It.)

A room in a Renaissance palace in which the rich or powerful could retire to study their rare books and contemplate their works of art. The studiolo became a symbol of a person's humanist learning and artistic refinement. Among the best known are those of Duke Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino, and Isabella D'Este in Mantua.

An artistic movement that arose in France toward the end of the nineteenth century, primarily in literature, in opposition to the reigning schools of Realism and Impressionism. Symbolism rejected objectivity in favour of the subjective, and turned away from the direct representation of reality in favour of a synthesis of many different aspects of it, aiming to suggest ideas by means of ambiguous yet powerful symbols. Among the artists associated with the movement were Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes in France, Fernand Khnopff in Belgium, Jan Toorop in Holland, Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, Gustave Klimt in Austria, and Giovanni Segantini in Italy.

Synthetism (French; synthèse, "summary")

A term that attained significance in the School of Pont-Aven, used primarily by Paul Gauguin to describe his method of picture development. In this method, the pictorial theme is stored in the mind of the artist in a process of thought synthesis and then applied to the canvas from memory. The result is not necessarily natural colours, but imaginary forms and decorative surface arrangements on the painting. A subject existing in reality thus becomes superfluous. In 1889 the Groupe Synthétists held an exhibition in which Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, and Louis Anquetin took part.